WAP on stud

Even though more and more cell phones employ real web browsers, like Opera Mini, which are able to load web pages normally like a computer, there still are some cell phones who can't handle it. In addition to that, wap pages are especially designed for cell phones, because they're usually much smaller and thus easier and cheaper to load.

To make a WAP page, all you need is a webserver like stud - and instead of writing .html-files, you write .wml-files. For more information on how to make a web page, please see this page.

How to make a WAP page

It is advantagous to make a seperate folder in your public.html-directory called something like wap to put files in. For wap, you use text-files with the ending .wml instead of .html like you do for normal web pages.

How do I start

As with all pages that you want to publish for others, you have to specify what kind of file it is and how the contents should be processed. For more explanation on this, see Wikipedia on DTD. For a wap page, we write:

						<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
						<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN"
						"http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml13.xml">
					

in the top of our .wml-files.

The rest of the page

To better understand how WML-pages work, think of a deck of cards. The cards are linked together and thus makes it easier for them to be downloaded to our cellphone. This means that the different cards/pages are more accessible as you will not have to download a new page each time you click on a link - the cell phone already know of them.

We'll want to start setting up our deck of cards with the <wml>-tag. To make a card, we use the tag <card id="name" title="Title">. The name is what we use to link to that card and the title gives the title of the card. Here is an example:

				<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
				<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN"
				"http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml13.xml">
				<wml> 
					<card id="index" title="WAP - langemyh"> 
						<p>
							This is a wonderful little page
						</p>
						<p>
							Lets link to another page.
						<br/>
						<anchor>Contact<go href="#contact" />
						</p>
						</card>
					<card id="contact" title="Contact - langemyh">
						<p>
							Name: Oracle
						</p>
						</card>
						</wml>
				

Other tag-examples

We'll give some examples of tags, where they are written in this font and their parameters in normal text. A parameter is a quality of a tag, like a person has a name or a certain color of hair.

• wml - the beginning of a deck of cards
• card - the beginning of a card
  id - The name of the card, something to identify it with (has to be unique for each card in a deck).
  title - A short explanation of that specific page.
• p - start a new paragraph
• Text-formatting:
  b - bold text
  i - italic text
  u - underlined
• Tables:
  table - start a table
  tr - new row
  td - new cell
  
• a - establish a link
  href - states which page (the id of the card)
  title - A short explanation of the link, usually the title

More on wap and WML

If you want to learn more about how to make wap pages with WML, W3schools has a great tutorial on it. They offer a more in-depth explanation with more tags and functions at this page.